Helping Your Struggling Colonies (and When to Give Up on Them)

Ideally, a beekeeper does not really "take care" of our bees. Instead, we help our bees to take care of themselves. We are more like coaches or cheerleaders for our bees than parents or doctors. Sure, we inspect our colonies, diagnose problems, and offer medicine and supplemental food to improve their health, but ultimately it's the bees that do most of the work to keep themselves healthy and strong. 

However, it's not uncommon to find yourself nursing the same colony along for week after week, month after month, until suddenly winter weather is looming. All of a sudden you look around and realize that you've become the colony's doctor… and your patient doesn't seem to be improving.

Scenarios you might see with your "problem colonies"

Suppose that you know each colony well, and have kept records of your visits and observations, mite treatments, honey harvests, and you notice that one colony just never keeps up with the rest. 

Here are some common issues you may have noticed:

• The little one that needed to be boosted in spring with 2 frames of capped brood and a honey/pollen frame, but it didn't bounce back.
• The one that rejected a new caged queen, then rejected another, and you let it raise its own, and it never caught up
• The one that you thought had European Foulbrood, but after a negative test, you decided just had Sacbrood plus Chalkbrood plus too few bees to care for the brood
• The split that lost all its field bees during splitting and therefore lagged behind
• The late swarm that you babied with honey frames, which then requeened itself in early fall
• The one that had a queen that never laid eggs as fast or as steadily as other queens
• The great colony that threw 5 swarms and ended up depleting itself so severely, it never bounced back
• The hive that the bear knocked over and dragged partly away, before leaving a sad/angry clump of bees clinging to a box in the rain
  
  

"Calling it" and combining weaker honey bee colonies 

A physician with a sick human patient usually keeps trying to help until the patient gets better, or dies. A dairy veterinarian sometimes decides that the best way to help a very sick cow is to euthanize her. But what about us beekeepers? We can do something that those other healers can't do: If our colony is sick, we can just combine it with another one. 

While helping a struggling colony for 5-6 months and trying one remedy after another, you may have grown very close to them. You may have a hard time making the decision that enough's enough. It's an essential skill, though, being able to "call it." Sometimes you can intervene in a way that lessens your number of hives, but saves some of the bees. If a weak colony is doomed to die during the winter, the queen is also doomed to die. Killing the queen of such a colony in the fall and uniting the bees from that colony above a strong colony may increase the survival odds of all of the bees involved (except the dead queen). 

How to combine honey bee colonies

You can combine, or unite, colonies with one sheet of newspaper between the boxes. As bees on both sides slowly chew away the paper, they will get used to each other's odors. With a colony that has very little brood, you can kill its queen and add the few frames with brood to another colony by inserting them in place of empty frames. Then simply shake bees off the rest of the equipment and take it away. The shaken bees will scatter and enter nearby hives, adding to their workforce. This works best during a nectar flow so the guard bees are more likely to let "foreign" bees come in.

The last thing you want to do is burn out trying to nurse one weak colony, and wind up neglecting winter preparations for the rest of your hives. Don't go into fall and winter frustrated and pessimistic because you don't expect your loser colony to survive. Instead, repurpose the bees and resources from weak colonies and help your strong colonies get ready for the cold weather to come.  

Risks of combining a weak colony with a strong colony

However, there is always a risk when combining a sick colony with a healthy one. If the colony is sick because of a bad queen or bad luck finding flowers that season, the salvaged bees and resources can boost one of your healthy colonies as they prepare for the first frost. However, a colony riddled with parasites, viruses, or bacteria will only harm the strong colony that you graft them to. It's important to do some real diagnostic work about what is wrong with a colony before you start wildly mixing and matching bees across your whole apiary. 

Final thoughts on dealing with colonies in trouble

The more seasons of beekeeping experience you accumulate, the better you'll recognize what is normal in your hives. With more experience, you'll be able to glance at the occasional troubled colony and quickly decide how to deal with it. Thinking through what you've already done to the colony this year and how much time is left in the season, you'll be able to decide whether a troubled colony will survive winter or not. And though it's never easy to crush a queen so that you can combine her bees with a stronger colony, it will be a little easier when you see that sometimes the kindest thing you can do to a weak colony is to "give up on them" and have them strengthen a healthy colony instead.